Harvard Surrenders to the Trolls

Remember Houston? The major hurricane before the last major hurricane? It’s still pretty bad there and it’s going to get worse before it ever gets better, assuming it ever does get better. There are thousands of little tragedies that are going to go unnoticed because of what’s happening in Florida, where thousands of little tragedies are also going to go unnoticed because of whatever comes next.

The country’s shredded attention span is one of its really great flaws. It has led directly to our current detachment from all of our history, which now includes stuff that happened two weeks ago. From The Houston Chronicle:

The EPA records request to Valero - a response is legally required - comes as the EPA said San Antonio-based Valero Energy "significantly underestimated" the amount of benzene and other compounds leaked during Harvey's torrential rains. The letter shows the EPA is choosing to further investigate the accident near East Houston's Manchester neighborhood.

Manchester, an east side neighborhood where nearly 90 percent of the population is Hispanic, set a record on Sunday with nearly 9 feet of water. Many of the residents there are now among the estimated 30,000 in need of shelters. Renters and low-income people in such neighborhoods couldn’t afford the luxury of telling Exxon Mobil Corp. to keep its heavily polluting operations away from their homes and schools. That created what Texas Southern University sociologist Robert Bullard calls “sacrifice zones.” “It’s very predictable as to which areas are going to get hit the hardest, because of how money gets allocated in terms of flood protection and flood control,” Bullard, often called the father of environmental justice, told HuffPost by phone on Sunday. “East side neighborhoods are the least protected.”

These are painful stories to cover, but they’re not particularly hard stories to cover. You just have to believe that news doesn’t leave town when the storm does. And you have to finance local news. And you have to care about actual people trying to put actual lives together again.

It’s been a great week for important institutions to get their chickenshit on. Harvard pulled a fellowship from Chelsea Manning because people in the CIA, and their fans in the media, were terribly wounded by the possibility that Manning might harsh the mellows of Jason Chaffetz or Sean Spicer. And it also bailed on a woman who’d done prison time for murder and, while incarcerated, became a brilliant historian. This got them some bad press anyway, too.

Harvard, which is still Harvard, has an endowment of $37.6 billion, which is the largest academic endowment in the whole damn world.

What in the fck are these people afraid of? Clay Travis? Tucker Carlson? Three Dolts on a Divan? Why is Big Money so horribly timid? It’s un-American, dammit.

Pop culture is being very, very good to me these days. As I said before, I was dreading the fact that the Vietnam War was going to get the Ken Burns treatment. However, my concerns largely have been allayed by the fact that my old statehouse pal Tom Vallely was involved in the production, and by the glowing reviews that already have been published by people I trust who have seen all or some of it. I think James Poniewozik is a damn fine critic and his review convinced me to open the rest of my mind and actually has me looking forward to it a bit. I hear Trent Reznor’s soundtrack is terrific, too.

And then there’s this. Pairing Frances McDormand with Martin McDonagh is something that should have been done in a lab at Oak Ridge before they loosed it on the unsuspecting public, McDonagh being the greatest artist working in saturation F-bombing since the death of Richard Pryor, as well as being the greatest writer of black comedy in recent memory.

Which reminds me. The Sunday Game reaches its climax at Croker this weekend. The Dubs being the Dubs is reason enough to root for Mayo in the All Ireland Final, but Mayo also hasn’t won the thing since 1952, which should inspire the latent curiosity of all recently sated Red Sox and Cubs fans, there being more than a few Irish-Americans in Boston and Chicago, as I recall. (And, yes, there’s a legendary curse. Something to do with the 1952 champions interrupting a funeral procession.) So here’s to the Mayomen. The West’s Awake!

It should be noted that the Republicans in the Senate are closing in on the Affordable Care Act again. The latest war wagon was constructed by Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana with help from our old friend, Lindsey Graham. Is it miserable and miserly, and is it completely insensitive to the lives of the chronically ill, the poor, and the struggling middle class? Of course it is. Does it “hand things back to states” so people like Scott Walker and Sam Brownback can run things? But, of course. This has brought John McCain aboard.

The senators are selling this idea as a compromise plan and say it is a way to return power to states, giving local governments more control over how they spend federal dollars. “Instead of a Washington-knows-best approach like Obamacare, our legislation empowers those closest to the health care needs of their communities to provide solutions,” Graham said in a statement. “Our bill takes money and power out of Washington and gives it back to patients and states. But the plan does much more than that. The proposal would eliminate the health care law’s subsidies for private insurance and end the Medicaid expansion. States could allow for waivers that let insurers charge sick patients higher premiums and stop covering certain benefits required under the Affordable Care Act, like maternity care or prescription drugs. The health insurance marketplaces would no longer exist as they are envisioned to continue under other Republican proposals.

In general, the plan would effectively punish states that have been especially successful at enrolling low- and moderate-income people in the Medicaid expansion or in marketplace coverage under the ACA, while imposing less damaging cuts, or even initially increasing funding, for states that have rejected the Medicaid expansion, enrolled fewer people in marketplace coverage, and have lower population density and lower per-capita income. The cuts would be especially severe in nine states — California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, and Virginia, plus the District of Columbia. By 2026, block grant funding amounts in these states would be 50 percent or less of the federal Medicaid expansion and/or marketplace subsidy funding these states would otherwise receive.

They simply never will stop. It is a crusade to prove that all the wrong things they believe are right. It is an effort to immiserate millions of Americans for the purpose of proving a point that can’t be proven without that immiseration. Ni shagu nazad. Never forget that. They love them some Stalin, or at least his attitude toward simply giving up on things you want. This already is too close for comfort, and the whole country is paying attention to other big stories. To hell, in this case, with bipartisanship. It’s a plague and it will kill people.

Is it a good week for dinosaur news, Fox News? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!

Dubbed the Deltasuchus motherali, the ancient beast was discovered by a local teenager, Austin Motheral. Motheral worked with paleontologists from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, who spent a decade excavating the bones. The creature existed approximately 95 million years ago, at the same time as Tyrannosaurus Rex. During that era, modern-day Texas was largely covered by a shallow sea. In addition to T. rex, the area was home to other dinosaurs, turtles, crocodiles, mammals and fish. Fossils from the Arlington Archosaur Site are helping fill in this gap, and Deltasuchus is only the first of several new species to be reported from the locality.”

Dinosaur-eating crocodiles are about as apex a predator as can be imagined, even by apex predators like us. But, as a concept, they’re amazing to think about. Dinosaurs lived then to make us happy now.

It was a busy week for The Committee, which was very tempted to award Top Commenter of the Week to Top Commenter Pat Healy for sending us the video to “Memo From Turner,” one of the most underrated cuts ever from the Rolling Stones. But instead, Top Commenter Craig Rode came rolling in with the best and most succinct analysis of the current president*.

Trump fires an arrow into the side of a barn, then draws a target around it. He's the world's greatest archer.

There’s an argument to be made that, maybe, he can’t hit the barn, either, but we give T.C. Rode the benefit of the doubt, and 71.01 Beckhams on top of it.

I’ll be back on Monday with what I am sure will be some hurricane leftover gobshitery. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, because crocodiles can eat dinosaurs. That’s just science.

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